Are you thinking about the use of Twitter in your small business? How can this micro-blogging service help me promote my business? Why is it important?

My views on the overall importance of Twitter for business varies each day. Some days I am on the bandwagon and some days I am not. I believe effective use of Twitter has some importance for a business and your presence on Twitter can help with your overall online fishing. I often speak on "casting your net" during our Calgary Online Marketing Courses. In the same breath it is important that business people don't consume all their time and efforts using Twitter as a tool to share information and events.

This is where a great blog comes into being an extremely strong strategy for your business. Using your blog as a centre point and then leveraging Twitter (automatically) to help share out your information can be a very effective strategy. Set it and forget it. My blogging strategy is to offer my insight on popular topics, simply not to retweet other peoples stuff.

Google announced this week that searchers have the ability to go back in time, eventually to March 2006 to see archived tweets from Twitter. This is pretty cool feature from Google. Google calls this search technology "Real-Time Search" and it has been around for few months now. This week Google announced enhancements to real-time search, you can read about it on their blog by visiting Google Real-Time Search.

Do you really want to see its effectiveness? Google "Iceland Volcano" to see how it works on trending topics. Real-time search is great, but it is really the archived Twitter search results that are impressive.

To see how the archived Twitter search works, just check out what Strathmore Realtor, Kevin Baldwin is doing on Twitter. His Chestermere Real Estate blog feeds Twitter every time he posts information on his blog, posts a video on YouTube or lists a home on the MLS system, check out his Twitter archive at Chestermere Real Estate.

The next big thing around this search technology is also the "Top Links" section. As a blogger, my goal is to share information with people they find interesting. The Top Links on the right side of the Real-time Search results shows some of the top URL's based on a particular search term.

Is your Search Engine Optimization firm helping you understand the importance of Real-time search?